The Ships of Jack Aubrey

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Revision as of 02:09, 18 August 2013

Like any stout-hearted Royal Navy midshipman or lieutenant, Jack Aubrey hungered for glory and for command of a ship. Indeed, the two were vitally connected, for the first was a path to the second and the latter -- with luck -- could bring the former. In the very first chapter of the first volume in Patrick O'Brian's magnificent series of novels about Jack Aubrey and his friend Stephen Maturin, Aubrey obtained his first real command on April 19, 1800. And glory followed.

This web page explores all of Jack Aubrey's vessels from the small sloop-of-war HMS Sophie of which he takes command at the beginning of Master and Commander through more than a dozen other sloops, frigates and ships-of-the-line until we leave him in 21: The Final, Unfinished Voyage of Jack Aubrey on the ship-of-the-line Suffolk, having raised his flag as rear admiral. And for any who might protest at the imprecision in the title of this page, the Sophie being only a brig and thus not truly a ship by the definition of the sea, I must fall back upon the sage words of that eminent nautical authority, Stephen Maturin: "Let us not be pedantical, for all love!"

For more than a decade I have been an avid fan of the nautical novels of Patrick O'Brian, an enthusiasm growing out of my long-standing interest in naval warships of the "Age of Fighting Sail" perhaps first sparked by childhood visits to "Old Ironsides". Oftentimes while reading these marvelous books, I have reached for the reference volumes on my shelves to better understand exactly what kind of vessel Jack Aubrey was commanding in the book in hand. And often I thought how convenient it would be to have a single source available to quickly find the basic information about the vessels, to look at their plans, and to compare one ship with another. These web pages are my effort to provide such a source of information.

In many cases, Patrick O'Brian put Jack Aubrey aboard real Royal Navy vessels of the era of the Napoleonic Wars, although frequently the author altered the actual histories of those ships to fit the world of his fictional hero. At other times, ships commanded by Aubrey had clearly identifiable historical prototypes, but with names and circumstances changed for the novels. For these historical vessels, whether commanded by Aubrey under their actual name or one fictional, a description of that ship is given below, accompanied by basic technical data and an image of the actual ship plans. Occasionally O'Brian invented a warship without obvious specific precedent. In those cases, a genuine vessel of appropriate design has been selected for presentation, again with data and plans.

Bruce Trinque
Amston, CT
March, 2006

Ships' Technical Data

In general the information given for each vessel is that applicable at the time of the original commissioning in the Royal Navy. Although the hull dimensions generally remained essentially unchanged throughout a ship's career (except in cases of major rebuilds of a type not applicable to any of Aubrey's commands), crew size and armament sometimes did substantially alter over years and decades of service. Gun types and quantities especially shifted around the beginning of the 19th Century when short-ranged but powerful carronades replaced many of the smaller-caliber long guns carried on quarterdecks and forecastles. Thus, the weaponry information presented here is not necessarily correct in all details for the period of Jack's Aubrey's command of the ship in question, although usually the main battery of guns is the same (a notable exception is HMS Surprise which under Aubrey's command typically carried 12-pound long guns, not the 9-pounders of the original armament scheme nor their 32-pound carronade replacements). Nominal crew sizes were adjusted from time to time and, of course, ships frequently served with crews under authorized strength.

An Explanation of Dimensions

Four dimensions are given for each ship. These are
Length - The length of the Lower Deck (the "lower deck" on a ship-of-the-line was that deck upon which the heaviest guns were placed; for frigates it was the deck immediately below the deck holding the main battery of cannons). This is the rough equivalent of "length between perpendiculars" for modern ships.
Keel - Not the length of the actual keel, but an artificial number used for calculations of tonnage.
Breadth - The "moulded" breadth at the widest part of the hull, "moulded" meaning the measurement was made to the outside of the hull frame, but inside the external planking.
Hold - The "depth in hold" was another artificial number sometimes used in calculating tonnage.
The dimensions cited for ships built for the Royal Navy are "as built" figures, if available; otherwise they are from the design plans; those for foreign prizes are "as built" figures taken during a survey after capture.

Tonnage

An artificial figure indicating not "displacement" as with modern ships (in essence, the weight of the ship) but a theoretical carrying capacity or "burthen". By the late 18th Century the standard formula for calculating tonnage was known as the Builders Old Measurement in which the Length minus three-fifths of the Breadth was multiplied by the Breadth times one-half the Breadth and then divided by the number 94, yielding the calculated tonnage of burthen (and explaining why the tonnage of vessels of this era usually include an odd fraction with "94" as the divisor). An equivalent technique was to multiply the Keel times Breadth times one-half Breadth and then divide by 94. The significance of such tonnage figures is that they permit a standard for a comparison of the relative overall size of different ships.

Sources

All technical data are taken from the late David Lyon's The Sailing Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy Built, Purchased and Captured, 1688-1860 (Conway Maritime Press, 1997) and Rif Winfield's British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1793-1817: Design, Construction, Careers and Fates (Chatham Publishing, 2005), with the relevant pages cited in each section. The ship plans come from several sources designated hereafter with page citations as: Boudriot - Jean Boudriot's The History of the French Frigate, 1650-1850 (Jean Boudriot Publications, 1993)
Gardiner - Robert Gardiner's Warships of the Napoleonic Era (Chatham Publishing, 1999)
Goodwin - Peter Goodwin's Nelson's Ships: The History of the Vessels In Which He Served, 1771-1805 (Stackpole Books, 2002)
Lavery [74] - Brian Lavery's The 74-Gun Ship Bellona (Naval Institute Press, 1985)
Lavery [JAC] - Brian Lavery's Jack Aubrey Commands (Naval Institute Press, 2003)
Lyon - David Lyon's The Sailing Navy List (Chatham Publishing, 2005)
NAN - Robert Gardiner's (editor) Nelson Against Napoleon: From the Nile to Copenhagen, 1798-1801 (Naval Institute Press, 1997)